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Tom Shippey on the Best New Science Fiction

Elan Mastai’s “All Our Wrong Todays” explains that we were living in a techno-utopia with unlimited energy and no poverty, war or disease—until a bumbling time-traveler sent us down the wrong track.

By

Tom Shippey

Updated Feb. 17, 2017 5:34 p.m. ET

What happened to the future sci-fi promised us back in the Asimov era? The robots, aircars, jetpacks and space colonies? Shouldn’t we have them by now?

In “All Our Wrong Todays” (Dutton, 384 pages, $26) Elan Mastai’s narrator Tom Barren says we do, or we did. All the advances sci-fi once imagined were made possible back in 1965. That year an inventor named Lionel Goettreider turned on his famous Engine, which converted the Earth’s...